How To Destroy The Earth

Thanks go to Pat (who apparently has too much time on his hands) for sending me this extremely long, comprehensive, and geeky article on how to destroy the earth. It's pretty entertaining, and as you might imagine, destroying our planet is exceptionally difficult. I hope I'm not spoiling the ending for you when I tell you that it's not possible with today's technology. That doesn't mean that we don't have a cataclysm to look forward to in the future though.

My personal favorite method is annihilation by antimatter. I think it would make for one hell of a show. Lights, things flying about, basically the greatest 4th of July celebration ever. The one drawback is that it is one of the more implausible methods due to the lack of available antimatter, not to mention the non-existence of any machine capable of hurling it at the earth.

For those of you who think all the described methods are implausible, you're right. However, the one shred of proof available is this report from the BBC (and you thought it would be from a questionable source) that some seismic disturbances are thought to have been caused by the earth being struck by a quark. The likelihood of a large enough amount of quarks striking the earth to destroy it remains low though.